Vojtěch Kovář

Natural language processing Centre
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
Brno, Czech Republic
xkovar3@fi.muni.cz


Lexical Computing
Brighton, UK & Brno, Czech Republic
vojtech.kovar@sketchengine.co.uk

About me

I am a researcher in computational linguistics, especially interested in corpus processing, language modelling and syntactic analysis (mainly English and Czech), and their real-world applications in language technology. Since 2006, I work as a specialist at the Natural language processing centre, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, in Brno.

At the university, I was involved in collaboration with Lexical Computing research company, founded by Adam Kilgarriff and developing the Sketch Engine corpus querying and management system. Since 2012, I partly work for the company directly.

In 2014 I defended my PhD thesis on application-driven syntactic analysis, also in relation to corpus analysis. My other publications are mainly on methods of corpus analysis, parsing and its applications.

I am also a musician, playing violin in Musica Moravica band.

Selected publications

Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J. Rychlý, P. and Suchomel, V. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, 2014, vol. 1, No 1, p. 7-36.

Kovář, V. Partial Grammar Checking for Czech Using the SET Parser. In 17th International Conference, TSD 2014. prvni. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2014. p. 308-314

Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář, V., Rychlý, P. and Suchomel, V. The TenTen Corpus Family. In 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL 2013. Lancaster, 2013. p. 125-127.

Kovář, V., Horák, A. and Jakubíček, M. Syntactic Analysis Using Finite Patterns: A New Parsing System for Czech. In Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2011. p. 161-171.

Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V. and Grác, M. Through Low-Cost Annotation to Reliable Parsing Evaluation. In PACLIC 24 Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. Tokyo: Waseda University, 2010. p. 555-562.

Teaching activities

• PLIN004 Elementary mathematics and statistics for Humanities, Part I
• PLIN006 Elementary mathematics and statistics for Humanities, Part II
• Lexicom workshops
• SKEW Sketch Engine workshops
• leading and consulting theses with relation to computational linguistics

Past and current research projects

• LINDAT/Clarin project (research team member since 2013)
• co-organizing workshops in computer lexicography and corpus linguistics: Lexicom, SKEW (since 2010)
• consultancy in corpus linguistics and corpus technology on behalf of Lexical Computing for major UK publishing houses (Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins)
• PRESEMT project (EU FP7/2007-2013, research team member)
• Temporal aspects of logic and information projects (research team member, 2008-2013)

Links

• my profile at the Masaryk university information system
• full list of publications
• PhD thesis
• CV
• teaching
• theses I was supervising/consulting
• Sketch Engine corpus query system
• SET parser